Who Needs People
by Arctic Banana
Summary: FL4K always preferred the company of animals to the company of people. As they happily made their way about Pandora in hopes of sating their bloodlust, they found themselves collecting several furry, scaly, and sometimes keratinous companions along the way. (Or how FL4K came into possession of so many animals.)


_Usually before a Borderlands game comes out, I can tell who the first character I'm going to pick is going to be based on what information is given in the previews. FL4K combines two things I love very much: Robots and animal companions. It's like Mordecai but with more robot. It couldn't have been anyone else._

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The whimper of a scared skag pup would break the heart of even the most heartless of bandits. Even though FL4K didn't even have a physical heart, the sound still managed to break theirs. They were unable to just walk away with that sound fresh in their mental processes and just knew they had to find it.

It hadn't taken long for FL4K to find the tiny pup. It stumbled around the garbage strewn alleyway, walking into trash cans, using the walls to guide itself, and panicking if it came to a dead end or corner that threw off its navigation. The poor thing was very clearly blind, the fact obvious by the way it stumbled around like it was trapped in a dark room despite it being very bright out, and its eyes were clouded over and unnatural looking. It likely had been born that way and was subsequently abandoned by an owner who saw it useless as a fighting skag or attack animal.

FL4K made a sound that they understood to be irresistible to all manner of animals, namely skags, dogs, cats, and occasionally bullymongs, and crouched with a hand extended towards it, waiting to accept it should it come forward. The skag turned its head in their direction and listened again for the sound. FL4K didn't disappoint it, and the pup slowly stumbled in their direction, not trusting its own feet to navigate it safely through its unknown environment. It startled itself by walking nose first into FL4K's hand, which it was unable to see coming, then gave them another sniff before biting down on the metal and attempting to chew it.

"Aww, you're teething," FL4K said fondly of the animal. It placed its paws on their hand and chewed some more, its tiny stub tail wagging behind it in happiness at having found someone else. "I'm going to call you Mr. Chew." Apparently Mr. Chew approved of his name because his gnawing turned to gleeful licking as he climbed into FL4K's hands and licked their face.

FL4K was a machine, albeit a sentient one, which meant that they thought like a computer. When a computer saw something as broken, they logically sought a way to fix it. Mr. Chew was blind because his eyes were broken, which meant that FL4K had to find a way to fix them so that Mr. Chew could see again. So the logical way to fix them would be to take them out and replace them with eyes that did work.

FL4K spent several weeks trying to humanely remove the eyes of skags that were gifted with sight to replace Mr. Chew's (they figured at most they needed two skags- if they took one eye from each, the skags would still be able to see and so would Mr. Chew), but it turned out that skags were not so keen on having their eyes removed from their sockets and would often thrash around during the process. Coupled with the fact that skags had very delicate little eyeballs and FL4K's hands were decidedly not equipped for handling such delicate little objects, and several dozen perfectly good skag eyeballs ended up accidentally getting crushed like grapes.

Eventually FL4K decided to just resort to the good old fashioned Pandoran way of correcting injuries and went full cyborg with Mr. Chew. The skag didn't seem to mind having cybernetic implants in his eye sockets. In fact, the only thing different about him was his excitement over the fact that now he could see everything _before_ he ran into it, which he still did probably because he ran so fast that he couldn't slow down before it was too late.

Mr. Chew was a welcome companion. FL4K didn't much care for the companionship of people as they could not understand them like they could understand a skag. People were weird, like how they would often insist on talking to you to get to know you instead of the more efficient way of just reading your actions to learn all you needed to know about them. They had once tried to People, but it turned out that it was easier to tell if someone was friendly or hostile by waiting to see if they shot at you rather than by walking up to them and saying, "Hello, I am designated FL4K. Would you be interested in engaging in platonic companionship?" The friendlies tended to stare at you, call you weird, and walk away while the hostiles just shot at you before you finished your sentence anyway.

Befriending a skag on the other hand was often as easy as tossing it a piece of meat and snuggling with it once it was no longer growling at you, though FL4K had discovered fairly quickly also that people didn't seem to like you walking up to their pets and smooshing their faces against your own, especially when they were trying to command the skag to bite your face off and it was ignoring them. FL4K allowed anyone who wanted to pet Mr. Chew to do so and couldn't understand why anyone would want to hoard the affection of their animals to themselves. They even encouraged Mr. Chew to give bandits kisses with his teeth so even the hostiles didn't feel left out.

So, FL4K decided to be content with the life of a wanderer, hunting down Pandora's biggest and most badass enemies accompanied by only a gun and their loyal skag...and crap, something was following them and it kept stealing Mr. Chew's food.

They noticed it when they went to feed Mr. Chew his afternoon treat. Anytime they shot a sizable chunk off of anything, it could be a bandit or even another skag, skags weren't picky about what kind of meat they were eating, FL4K would pick it up and stuff it in their pack for later. If Mr. Chew got hungry or just wanted his usual treat, they'd reach into their bag and toss it to him, sometimes using it as incentive to teach him a new trick. They were still working on the "Don't Chase That Car" trick.

FL4K had earlier stuffed part of a beer-marinated bandit liver in their pack, Mr. Chew's favorite. When they reached in and pulled it out though, they realized that there were significantly sized bites taken out of it. The bites had not been there before, which meant they had to have occurred during the brief moment where FL4K set their bags on the ground and left them out of sight long enough to untangle Mr. Chew from the fishing line that they inexplicably found abandoned in the middle of an icy tundra. Mr. Chew didn't mind eating a liver that had already been half eaten, but it bothered FL4K that someone had gotten to it before their beloved skag.

The liver could have been pilfered by any number of scavengers: skags, spiderants, maybe even a really hungry midget, but the strangest thing was that most of it was still there. Most of the wildlife of Pandora would have eaten the entire thing, then ate the keychains off the bag, and then ate the bag itself, but whatever had taken the food had taken bites of it and put the rest of it back, almost like it was hoping that no one would notice that anything was amiss.

Then it happened again. FL4K didn't need to sleep, but Mr. Chew did. Normally they would carry him when he got tired, but they really needed to clean the dust out of their gears anyway, so they violently evicted some psychos from an old shack and settled down for the night. While Mr. Chew laid on his side on a pile of rags, occasionally flailing his legs in chase of a screaming bandit in a dream-version of Pandora, FL4K sat down and loosened a few screws enough to dump all of the trapped dirt and grime out onto the table.

They ignored the rustling sound at first, assuming it to be Mr. Chew. When they noticed the sound coming from the floor where they had laid their bags, they began to turn around, saying, "Mr. Chew, you already ate. It's bedtime."

What they saw sitting on the bag was not Mr. Chew. Mr. Chew was on his back on the floor, tongue hanging out, front paws paddling the air as though he were swimming across a lake. Sitting on the bag with one hand in the meat pocket was a large eyed monkey-like creature who looked terrified that it had been caught. It was small and emaciated with proportions that suggested it might still be a baby. Screeching in fear, the meat thief scrambled across the room and tried to get out of the shack through the same hole in the wall that it had gotten in from.

Mr. Chew rolled over onto all four paws and was awake almost immediately. He spotted the small primate creature halfway through the hole and charged it, grabbing it by the tail and pulling it back in. At first FL4K thought Mr. Chew was about to eat it, but they were surprised by his behavior when instead he seemed to want to make friends with it and started pinning it to the floor under a paw so that he could lick it. The tiny monkey beast looked scared and tried to get out from under him. FL4K called him off and Mr. Chew promptly obeyed, running to his master with a wagging stub tail while the small animal scurried under a low hanging shelf.

FL4K determined the animal to be a tiny wee jabber, definitely a baby, likely orphaned judging by its emaciated appearance. They'd observed the rare animals in the wild just days prior and had instinctively archived notes about their behavior with all the meticulousness of an AI programmed to remember everything. The jabber had likely been following them for days, stealing pieces of meat from their bag anytime it was unattended for any period of time to survive.

FL4K had one arm around Mr. Chew's chest to hold him at bay. The skag panted and repeatedly looked from the shelf where he knew his new friend was hiding and at his master's face. It was unknown how Mr. Chew was able to take social cues from a faceless machine with only one eye, but Mr. Chew somehow always seemed to know how FL4K wanted him to act just by looking at their expression, or lack thereof. Seeming to determine that he shouldn't try to get at the jabber anymore out of FL4K's worry that he might scare it, Mr. Chew sat down and waited for further instruction.

FL4K often surprised complete strangers with how well trained and obedient Mr. Chew was. They still had trouble keeping him from normal skag behavior like eating and peeing on everything in sight, but he didn't bite anyone he wasn't supposed to and if FL4K wanted him to leave something alone, he left it alone. They moved their hand away from him and the skag obediently stayed put.

The jabber whimpered and curled its tail around itself defensively, even as FL4K tried making that irresistible sound that had attracted Mr. Chew. Reaching into their bag, they retrieved a bit of the meat that the animal was trying to thieve earlier and held it out in front of them.

"It's okay. I won't hurt you," FL4K reassured the jabber.

It didn't come out right away, but it definitely showed interest in the proffered food. FL4K tried making the sound again along with offering the food and that seemed to show a more immediate reaction. Creeping out from under the shelf, the jabber was half exposed, rear half still hidden, and stood stock still, turning its head to look at Mr. Chew to gauge his reaction. Mr. Chew had since lost interest and was licking himself, so it chanced sneaking forward, taking the meat from FL4K's hand, and ran back to cover, this time crawling between a metal storage crate and the wall.

FL4K waited for it to finish eating. Once the jabber had finished licking the blood off of its hands, it poked its head once more out into the open. Seeing it reemerge, FL4K held out a hand towards it. The jabber slowly crawled out of hiding, dragging its long tail behind it as it did so, and crept forward towards the robot. It placed both hands on one of FL4K's fingers, and when they made no attempt to grab it, it hoisted itself up into their hand and scurried up their arm onto their shoulder.

The jabber must have felt safe up there because the next thing they knew, it was curling up inside of their hood and closing its eyes, its tail dangling down their shoulder like the tail end of a scarf.

Meat-Thief proved to grow rather quickly under a regular diet, even faster than Mr. Chew had, and his higher primate intelligence began to reveal itself just as quickly in his natural curiosity.

"Hey, uh...buddy...I think you might want to take that away from him," a nervous sounding Pandoran native said to FL4K.

They turned their head to the jabber sitting on their shoulder. Like Mr. Chew's more primal skag traits that they couldn't seem to train out of him, Meat-Thief it seemed could not be trained to stop going through their bags and examining everything they got ahold of. He had found a pistol in one of the pockets. It was a fairly nice pistol, one that FL4K had taken apart and customized theirself with favorable parts from compatible guns. It wasn't like Meat-Thief was just stupidly playing with something that he didn't realize was dangerous, either. The jabber had watched FL4K shoot living things many times before and had since learned what it could do.

Meat-Thief looked at the native and cocked his head before taking aim and shooting him in the leg. He bobbed up and down with a smiling expression on his face when he realized he'd figured out how it worked while the native laid on the ground screaming.

"Aww, he thinks he's people," FL4K said fondly of their jabber's intelligence.

This gave FL4K an idea. They'd trained Mr. Chew to carry items for them as well as attack on command. Aside from being a lovable pet and irreplaceable companion, he was also functionally useful. Now that they knew that Meat-Thief had the higher intelligence necessary to work a gun, all they had to do was teach him how to aim it at the right people.

And he did aim it at the right people. And sometimes traveling merchants. And once he'd mugged a couple of teenagers for a stick of gum with it. But for the most part he seemed to be grasping the concept. The downside was that he didn't have very good aim. In fact, one might say that his aim was broken. And when a robot encountered something that they thought was broken…

It wasn't hard to get Meat-Thief to wear the corrective visor that FL4K had fashioned for him. Meat-Thief liked to take sunglasses as well as meat, which FL4K suspected might be because the jabber thought he looked good in them. The visor helped Meat-Thief by showing him exactly what he was aiming at, as well as telling him who _not _to aim at by marking friendlies with a big red X, so that he would stop shooting merchants in the leg and getting them chased out of small towns. As FL4K seemed to be figuring out, for some reason people didn't like it when monkeys shot them in the leg.

Until Meat-Thief could improve his aim, FL4K would take their pets out into spiderant territory, figuring if the jabber could aim well enough to hit a spiderant on its well-guarded abdomen from a distance, then he was ready to help in a gunfight. Every time he would manage to do so, he would look back at FL4K to gauge their reaction, and upon realizing that it was favorable, Meat-Thief smiled and did a sort of dance in place.

After a successful day of teaching their monkey-son to shoot, FL4K found a reasonably fortified place for them all to settle down for lunch...well, the pets ate lunch, FL4K just took that time to grab a can of oil and fix that creaky joint. As they tested how well lubricated their wrist was, they noticed that Mr. Chew wasn't eating.

"Are you not feeling well, boy?" they asked their skag.

Mr. Chew turned his head to look at his master and whimpered sadly. He stood up and climbed on top of a pile of garbage and continued whimpering, looking back at his master and out into the dust basin. FL4K figured that Mr. Chew must know something they didn't and stood up to join their pet on the ledge.

Down below was a brood of spiderants, led by a sizable queen. The spiderants all swiftly followed her back to their underground colony and she stopped to look behind her to see if they were all following.

That's when FL4K saw her. Bringing up the rear was a centurion. She dragged one of her front legs along the ground alongside her and tried her best to keep up with her family. There was something tightly wrapped around the leg, twisting it into an unnatural position that made it appear broken. All the other broodlings managed to keep up, but the straggler struggled to keep pace with them. She let out a desperate cry, begging them to wait for her as she sprinted before tripping and collapsing in the dirt.

The queen watched her fall, as did the rest of the brood. She watched her stumble in the dirt, desperately attempting to get up, trying to use the broken limb and collapsing in pain when it failed to support her. The queen turned around and began to leave. One by one her broodlings followed her. Once more the straggler tried to get up and follow, and once more she was slowed down as she hobbled along on three legs. Collapsing once more, she watched as she was left behind.

Pandora demanded that she would die there, the weakest member of her brood who had been culled by the planet's harsh nature. Mr. Chew seemed to think this was unfair and before FL4K could reach out and grab him, the skag had already taken off down the garbage dune and charged towards the spiderant abandoned to die in the dirt.

Meat-Thief climbed onto FL4K's shoulder and they followed their pet after the spiderant. The broodless one pulled her three undamaged limbs against her body in a futile attempt at shielding her from what she assumed was the predator that would cause her demise. Mr. Chew whimpered and wagged his tail, leaned forward, and licked the keratinous plate that made up the spiderant's head.

The source of her injury appeared to be a metal snare, set by a bandit in hopes of catching a meal, only for Broodless to manage to get out of it, but not before it got wrapped around her limb tight enough to cut off circulation and dig into the softer part of her leg. She made a frightened chirp even as FL4K's hand grazed her gently enough to reassure her that they meant her no harm.

FL4K managed to cut the wire off of her limb and had the wound cleaned and bandaged. Unfortunately it was too little too late and two days later, the tissue in Broodless' leg had completely died and the limb fell off at the point where she had been snared. She struggled to walk without the missing limb and though she was reasonably mobile, she was slow and straggled behind FL4K and their pets until they took pity and carried her.

Carrying her quickly proved to be inconvenient. She wasn't heavy, but she couldn't hold on very well without the aid of the missing limb and FL4K sometimes had trouble juggling her with a gun in a firefight. And so like Mr. Chew's eyes and Meat-Thief's aim, FL4K decided to fix Broodless' broken limb. A scavenged drill bit seemed to be the right size and shape to take the place of the missing leg. Once attached, Broodless quickly got the hang of moving around on the makeshift prosthetic and soon she was able to keep up even with Mr. Chew at his fastest sprint.

Broodless repaid FL4K's favor towards her by quickly proving herself useful. She managed to snag a couple rakks in a web she'd made and presented them live as gifts, rakks which proved easily tamable by one who knew the best way to approach a frightened animal. She could fight just as well as FL4K's other pets and was just as loyal, as though she realized that she owed her life to them. Even though she could have just as easily attempted to go home and reintegrate with her family, Broodless chose to stay with FL4K and follow them as though they were her new queen.

FL4K could not always understand people. They often struggled with social cues and felt awkward when trying to communicate feelings of theirs that they still didn't completely understand either. They did, however, understand animals, on a level that most humans couldn't even understand. And you know what? For them at least, that was okay.

Cuz who needed people anyway?


End file.
